A series of three experiments investigated semantic and syntactic effects in the production of Adjective+Noun phrases in Dutch. Bilinguals (Dutch native speakers) were presented with English nouns and were asked to produce an Adjective+Noun phrase in Dutch which included the translation of the noun. In two experiments, we blocked items by either semantic category or grammatical gender.We found that participants performed the task slower when the target nouns were of the same semantic category than when they were from different categories; and faster when they were of the same grammatical gender than when they were of different gender. In a final experiment, both manipulations were crossed in order to both replicate the previous experiments and to test for interactions between the two effects. The results of the first two experiments were replicated, and crucially no interaction was found. These findings are compatible with models of lexical retrieval in production in which, first lexico-semantic and lexico-syntactic information are separable; second the flow of activation between the two is feedforward.

Since the 1960s, much research has addressed the issue of how the two languages of a bilingual are cognitively represented. This early research, mostly during the 1960s and 1970s, posed the question as one versus two separate stores. Not all, but a large part of these studies focused specifically on the organization of the lexicon and these will be concerned here. Some researchers suggested entirely separate lexicons (Kolers, 1963). Much of this research was influenced by the three types of bilingualism originally proposed by Weinreich (1953). In what he labeled a coordinate structure, both meaning and form are completely language specific. In a compound structure, meaning is shared and form is language specific. In a subordinate structure, the form representation in the weaker language is attached to the form in the dominant language, and not directly to the meaning component. With time, the coordinate structure has received less support, because it is considered unlikely that a word meaning is so divergent in two languages